The Livable House 



are in bloom, peonies and anchusa flower all over the garden and 

 not just in one portion; or when phlox and veronica are in season 

 the whole garden is aglow with purple and pink. 



In a garden of many varieties a somewhat different arrange- 

 ment must be adopted so that the flowers will not have a scatter- 

 ing appearance. More varieties necessitate fewer flowers of a 

 kind, and these must be planted in groups big enough to count as 

 masses; and the masses, moreover, must drift into one another and 

 not have the appearance of blocks. To accomplish this latter ob- 

 ject it is necessarv to lap the mass of one kind of flo\\-er bv that of 

 another; or, to put it another way, to scatter one group into the 

 next. 



Color arrangement of this sort of border is complicated and 

 difificult to manage eft'ectively. Miss Gertrude Jekyll, a very able 

 writer about English gardens, has taken up very fully in her book 

 called "Color in the Flower Garden," the graduation of color in 

 a border. Miss Jekyll says that it is possible to plant, beginning 

 with vellow through orange and red to pink, purple, violet, and 

 blue-and this is undoubtedly true of one of those illimitable 

 English borders which seem to stretch away to infinity. Un- 

 fortunately American gardens are sadly lacking in borders four- 

 teen or fifteen feet wide and three hundred feet long. For the 

 most part our gardens are small, and it has been my sad expe- 

 rience that some of the vivid zinnias have been just as blighting 

 separated from the pink phlox by a patch of white as they would 

 have been next door to it. In any garden, all of which is visible 

 at once, it is best to limit the flowers to varieties which harmonize, 



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